Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

these subordinates, and even then, Powell Hill’s father was a townsman and a merchant rather than a landholder. Hill was also known to be as rakish and irreligious as “Stonewall” Jackson was a severe and devout Presbyterian.27

Lee, by contrast, came from the elite of Virginia Tidewater society and low-church Virginia Episcopalianism (even though much of his land and slaves had come from his wife’s family and not through Lee’s spendthrift and bankrupt father). Although Lee had repeatedly expressed before the war his personal preference for seeing slavery brought to an end at the right time, like most Virginia slaveholders Lee found that the right time was never within the foreseeable future, and Lee began the war as committed to the defense and preservation of slavery as any other slaveholder. In every respect, Lee was the embodiment of the ideal Virginia planter—decent, gentlemanly, religious, and immovably convinced that slavery was, for the unending present, the best of all possible worlds for black people.28 And he expected, demanded, and received from his subordinate officers precisely the unarguable deference that his middle-class lieutenants were conditioned and expected to give.

Another key to Lee’s successes on the battlefield was his cultivation of good relations with Jefferson Davis. The Confederate president originally intended to use Lee in much the same way that Lincoln used Henry Halleck, as a general military adviser and liaison between the army and the government, and from March to June 1862 Lee worked behind a desk in Richmond as an informal military chief of staff to the Confederate President. Although Joseph E. Johnston’s wound in the Peninsula campaign forced Davis to put Lee into field command, the two remained in very close communication throughout the war, and Lee’s victories in the Peninsula convinced Davis to yield to Lee’s strategic judgment throughout the ensuing eighteen months. By 1863, Lee had become indispensable to Davis: as Davis wrote to Lee, to find “someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army, or of the reflecting men of the country, is to demand an impossibility.”29 Thus, Lee was able to exercise, through Davis, an outsize influence over the shape of Confederate military operations and logistics.

The most important key to Lee’s successes was his aggressiveness. Beneath the marble-like calm and dignity that his soldiers and enemies so admired, Lee was a volcano of aggressive impulses. The “evenness and self-control in General Lee’s bearing and habits of thought… prevented the ordinary observer from realizing the boldness and energy held reserve under cover of his composed demeanor,” warned William Preston Johnston, one of Jefferson Davis’s military aides (and the son of the fallen Albert Sidney Johnston). “Lee was the most aggressive man I met in the war,” wrote John Singleton Mosby, “and was always ready for an enterprise.” In the spring of 1862, when Lee was still a relatively new and untried article, one man asked Colonel Joseph Ives, who knew Lee, whether the general possessed sufficient vigor and audacity to defend Richmond. “If there is one man in either army, Confederate or Federal, head and shoulders above every other in audacity it is General Lee. His name might be audacity. He will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker than any other general in this country, North or South; and you will live to see it, too.”30

Ives’s prediction was amply borne out, for Lee easily turned into a different man on the battlefield than he was in the drawing room. In the early months of the war, Lee favored a cautious, defensive strategy. “Our policy should be purely on the defensive,” he advised in the first two weeks of the war, believing that it was still possible that “Reason” will “resume her sway” and convince the Lincoln administration to turn to negotiations rather than conflict. That confidence melted away before the end of the year, and he soon came to realize that the South’s resources were too feeble to prevent the Northern juggernaut from gradually crushing a passive Confederacy. Nor did he look for salvation from Britain or France. “You must not build your hopes on peace on account of the United States going into a war with England,” he warned in 1861, “Expect to receive aid from no one.” Only by quickly meeting the Yankee armies straight on, using surprise and dexterity to defeat and embarrass them, and thus rapidly depressing Northern war morale to the point where disheartened Northerners would declare the war unwinnable, did the Confederacy stand a chance. “I am aware that there is difficulty & hazard in taking the aggressive,” he warned the Confederacy’s Secretary of War in 1863, James A. Seddon. Apart from inducing a swift Northern collapse, however, Lee privately considered the Confederacy to be doomed. “He knew [in 1861] the strength of the United States Government,” wrote William Preston Johnston.31

On the other hand, Lee knew that democracies do not easily bear the burdens of long wars. Democracies are geared to peace, and public opinion in a democracy cannot be regimented and drummed up repeatedly. If the Confederates were wise, they would “give all the encouragement we can, consistently with truth, to the rising peace party of the North.” Let Lincoln’s Northern opposition declare the war to be lost, let them wax eloquent about their desires for an armistice and negotiations “for a restoration of the Union,” and let their constant yammering for peace talks finally compel Lincoln to agree to an armistice. Once a truce was announced and the talks begun, Lincoln would never be able to convince war-weary Northerners to restart the war; the Confederates could then dismiss any talk about “bringing us back to the Union” and demand a “distinct and independent national existence.” That, of course, meant allowing Lincoln’s Northern opposition to think that the goal of peace talks would be reunion when in fact the Confederates never intended any other outcome than independence, but “it is not the part of prudence to spurn the